My First Experience with Twine

tldr: Good for its purpose, writing text-focused interactive stories. Would use it again in writing or planning games or for tight game jam deadlines.

What is Twine?

In its website, Twine is defined as “an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories”. I like to think about it as a branching dialog game creator.

My Experience

After finishing the [[Customer Cat Postmortem|last game jam]], I was eager to participate in another one, but I only had 8 hours to submit something. With my current skill set, I knew I couldn’t make a polished graphical game in that time, so I decided to write an interactive story instead. It’s a game after all, right?

The Good

It is straightforward to use and start creating a story and the branching paths. Besides that, you can structure your story however you want, make a choice based game or a linear one; you’re in control of how it works.

Writing was the easiest part, I simply typed and I had a functional text game in an hour or so. And the editor lets me see how my planning is structured and where I should put more effort into.

The Downsides

Everything outside of writing text is not so clear. The documentation is not easy to navigate and there are talks about plugins, story formats and all that when I just want to play a sound or insert an image. Basically, to make anything else, I had to browse reddit answers and keep trying their code.

Yes, I know, Twine scripting is basically [[HTML]], [[CSS]] e [[JavaScript]]. Even so, why can’t I preview the images I want to put in my game? I have to export the game to .html file, create a folder and put the images in it, and I still can’t see the images inside the editor itself!

Audio

To play audio like music, sfx or ambience, you need a plugin. And to install that plugin you have to insert a huge .js and .css file in your project and even then you can’t just activate it, you have to create an invisible special path for it to work. Furthermore, there’s a lot of “um, actually” things to work on still. I just wanted to play some music…

Conclusion

It is a good tool for interactive stories; you can have something working in 10 minutes and make something fun with it. But I expected more ease of use and established practices (don’t get me wrong, the software is amazing). I would only use for tight game jam deadlines or strictly text-focused ideas, though; for something more elaborate, I would prefer [[Ren’Py]].